Early in his long career, Alfred North Whitehead had, with his former student Bertrand Russell, written the monumental Principia Mathematica.^§MS1a Starting a second career at age 63, he moved from the University of London to Harvard University. Here, he turned his focus from mathematics to philosophy of meaning.

In 1927 he was invited to give the famed Gifford lectures. In other years, William James, Hannah Arendt, and John Dewey have lectured. Often the lecture hall had been packed, as was it was in anticipation of Whitehead’s first lecture. His topic: “Process and Reality.”

But by the second and subsequent lectures, the numbers dwindled down to half a dozen stalwarts, the material was so dense. Had he not known who Whitehead was, said one member of the audience, he “would have suspected that it was an imposter making it up as he went along.” The year before, he had given a series of five lectures at the University of Illinois, an early version of his Gifford lectures, where according to one wit, “the philosophers did not understand the lectures but hoped the mathematicians did, and the mathematicians did not understand the lectures but hoped the philosophers did.”¹⁵²

Later, Whitehead’s Gifford lectures were published as a book of over four hundred pages. The first edition was riddled with typographical errors, and editors of a later edition had to go through a torturous process of trying to figure out what Whitehead had meant.¹⁵³ Late in his life and with things he urgently needed to say, Whitehead had little patience for proofreading.

Acknowledging his debt to Bergson, Whitehead addresses two contradictory biases in modern philosophy – objectivist and subjectivist orientations to experience – and maps these onto parallel biases in the everyday human representation of experience. Francis Bacon’s scientific method of observation and induction tended to find static things in the world by virtue of its objectivist, empiricist orientation. So too mathematics tends to assume through oversimplification that each additional one-object is for the purpose of enumeration namable as the same object as the previous one. This is a radically revisionary thought from a co-author of Principia Mathematica.

Language also leads us to objectification, where the subject as an object precedes and is separated from the predicate as action. By these means, we tend to atomize “the extensive continuum of the world” into separate entities. “We analyze the world in terms of static categories.” We spatialize the universe at the expense of fluency. We freeze moments in time at the expense of the life history of the object. We relegate “each item of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of a novel ‘one’.”

However, says Whitehead, in reality nothing is so static and repetitive. No subject experiences the same thing twice. Whitehead likes Locke’s^§MS1.3a bleak phrase; our experience of the world is one of “perpetual perishing.” “We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience.”¹⁵⁴

In other moments of science and everyday experience, however, we do the opposite, we tend to subjectivize. Such is the occupational hazard of philosophical rationalism or purely Analytical Philosophy where we can deduce meanings from the syntax of language or the logic of mathematics. (Again, this from a co-author of Principia Mathematica.) We make the mistake of working from the “tacit assumption of the mind as subject and of its contents as predicates.” This blinds the meaning-maker to the wholeness of the world; “the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection … Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.” So too in everyday life, “we must … avoid the solipsism of the present moment.”¹⁵⁵

Whitehead’s philosophy of process sets an ambitious agenda, “to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” It lays out “metaphysical first principles,” by means of which to identify the wholeness of the world in its infinite diversity, a “flux of things” in which “all things flow.” Making a part of this journey in science, “Newton ordered fluency back into the world” with his Theory of Fluxions, or the mathematics of calculus.^§MS1.3.2d However, this same mathematics could slip back, only “to atomize the extensive continuum” into static, infinitesimal datapoints.

Reaching first principles in the last sentence of his lectures, Whitehead speaks to the process of experience as an “insistent craving, … [a] zest for existence … refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.”¹⁵⁶ This, in our terms, is how we live transposition.

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¹⁵² Victor Lowe, 1990, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Volume 2: 1910–1947, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 250, 207.

¹⁵³ Alfred North Whitehead, 1928 [1978], Process and Reality, New York, NY: Free Press, Editor’s Preface.

¹⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 5–6, 12–13, 67, 209, 321, 211, 29, 210, 50.

¹⁵⁵ Ibid., pp. 51, 15, 81.

¹⁵⁶ Ibid., pp. 3, 79, 208–9, 332, 351.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 130-132. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Alfred North Whitehead’s "Process and Reality" §MS1.2.2c